A Little Over 6 Months of 3D Printing It’s all Amazon’s Fault. Black Friday 2017 – Amazon dropped an offer on the Wanhao I3 Plus. Retail therapy has always been a… vice? – From tech, computers… to whimsically buying camper-vans. ‘New Toys’ have always been hard to resist!Read More →

Lets get OpenHAB Running! Now we’re out of the woods as it were with the hardware and interfaces, we need to get something to tie everything together. I’m using OpenHAB at the centre of my install. I’ll try and outline the setup below: Prerequisites OpenHAB is platform agnostic running ontop of JAVA, at the moment the rerecorded Java Virtual Machine is Oracle Java 8. Unfortunately while Jessie ships with Oracle JDK, it’s not up to date, and installing it can be a royal pain in the posterior. To this end, I’m going to just grab the binary and install it. Before we do however, letsRead More →

nRF24l01+ MiLight / LightEU control Currently the final step in the hardware series is getting the on-board Nordic 2.4Ghz transceiver up and running. If you’re following along, Part 3 should have had you check out my git repo recursively, so most of the hard work should have already been done. We need too grab the RF24 project for control of the nRF24L01:

Note, this will probably fail on a Raspbery Pi 1. – I’ll update these instructions later! Providing everything works, lets go and build the openmilight repo.

Once that’s complied we should now have a working openmilight executable!   Note: openmilight requires directRead More →

Send & Receive 443~Mhz Transmissions Getting IR working is probably the most standard and well investigated side of this project. Now we’re starting to step off the beaten track, and while by no means a novel or undocumented step. Things are starting to get less straight forward. Adding the ability for my Amazon Echo to control ‘dumb’ appliances was the main goal. I’d come across the Energenie products already, and the Pi-Mote shield looked good; but it seemed a waste of a board. If I’m using a Raspberry Pi – I don’t want it limited to one form of IO. So while my own boardRead More →

Building the Software Stack This is the continuation from Part 1 located here. Hopefully if you’re reading up to this point, you’ve now followed the instructions in part 1, and have a newly installed image on your Pi, or you’re already familiar with the Raspberry Pi, and you want to add the software stack to an existing pi. – If the latter is the case, then be aware that by this point I assume you already have SPI enabled. If you don’t it’d be wise to enable it before continuing. If all is good, follow me after the jump.Read More →

So, this is a little out of order, and I’ll add more to the build and design log soon. For now there’s a couple of people that wanted a quick start to get things going, they’re the ones I’m hoping will commit back to the repositories. So here goes, how to get from a basic pi, to an Alexa (Echo) enabled OpenHAB hub.Read More →

The “Oh – Why Not?” Rewind to 15th September, 2016 – Amazon Launch a promotion for the Echo for £99.99. I grew up watching StarTrek on a Friday at 6pm on BBC 2, I loved the ships, the Utopian setting for the most part and the technology. With my farther being an engineer, tinkerer and inventor, I loved the characters of Geordi La Forge and Montgomery Christopher Jorgensen “Scotty” Scott. I think I must have seen Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home about a hundred times. And this was on VHS with advert breaks and all! I always remember how ‘quaint’ the scene was with Scotty attempting to useRead More →